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BACK AT THE RANCH: Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as A Prairie Home Companion's Dusty and Lefty.

As he accepted his honorary Oscar in March, Altman revealed (though not for the first time) that he had a heart transplant more than a decade ago. Although Altman mused that he probably had "40 years left" on his new ticker, the 81-year-old director looked noticeably more frail than he did doing interviews for The Company in 2003. On-set photos from Companion showed Altman in a wheelchair, uncomfortably recalling the sight of John Huston trailing his oxygen tank on the set of The Dead, and the news that the production's insurance agent required a spare director to be present at all times in case Altman was unable to complete the shoot certainly didn't help matters (except, perhaps, for Paul Thomas Anderson). Altman shows no signs of wanting to retire (he seems likely to die, so to speak, in the saddle), but with A Prairie Home Companion, he's prematurely written his own obituary. Loose-limbed and folksy as it is, Companion is, to put it bluntly, obsessed with death.

The death in question is not corporeal, even though a cast member does keel over midway through. Rather, it's the death of a way of life, and a certain kind of leisurely, humanist art. Like many of Altman's movies, Companion pays homage to the joy of creation, plunging headlong into the backstage chaos of a typical broadcast. Keillor plays himself (or, at least, a character named "G.K."), as do the show's house band and several regular performers (Robin and Linda Williams and Prudence Johnson among them). The rest of the roles are filled by a bevy of odd-sock stars: Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the surviving members of a singing sister act, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly as a pair of foulmouthed musical cowboys, Lindsay Lohan as Streep's poetry-scribbling daughter. (For better or worse, the actors do their own singing, from Streep's amiable warble to Lohan's unbearable massacre of "Frankie and Johnny.") The performers affect a well-worn ease with each other (as well as a few long-simmering grudges), but a cloud hangs over the Fitzgerald Theater this night. Word is circulating that the station's owners have sold out to a conglomerate (eventually personified by Tommy Lee Jones' axeman), and this broadcast will be the last.

The performers and crew are, of course, heartbroken. "It's the end of an era when this show goes," sighs Marylouise Burke's makeup woman. "There won't be anything on the radio but people yellin' at you and computers playin' music." But G.K. resists the slightest tinge of sentiment, declining to inform the audience that they may be witnessing the show's final broadcast. "Every show's your last show—that's my philosophy," he says. Even when a cast member turns up dead in his dressing room, G.K. declines to memorialize him on the air. With gentle gruffness, he observes, "I'm at an age where if I start doing eulogies, I'll never stop." (The remark seems a trifle premature coming from the 63-year-old Keillor, but you get the point.)

So rather than go out with a bang, the cast does what they always do, and so does Altman. A Prairie Home Companion breaks no ground; like every Altman feature of the last 15 years (with the sole exception of the florid noir The Gingerbread Man), the film is an ensemble-cast description of an ad hoc community, bound together whether they know it or not. There's surprisingly little interaction between the show's various acts—Streep and Tomlin's Johnson Sisters, for example, rarely cross paths with Harrelson and Reilly's Dusty and Lefty—but Altman and Keillor contrive a handful of characters whose main purpose is to circulate between dressing rooms and remind you that the movie's events are all transpiring simultaneously. There's Burke's makeup woman, Maya Rudolph's stage manager, and G.K. himself, and on top of them, Kevin Kline's incarnation of the radio show's flat-footed private dick, Guy Noir, here reduced to working backstage security. Kline, whose bumbling slapstick is gratingly unfunny, soon runs afoul of a mysterious damsel in a white trench coat, played by Virginia Madsen and referred to in the credits as Dangerous Woman. (She's called by another name, but that would be telling.) Wafting portentously from scene to scene, Madsen gamely tries to fit her purely symbolic character into the movie's naturalistic chaos—an impossible task, but one that at least yields her the movie's pivotal line: "The death of an old man is never a tragedy."

There is, thankfully, no evidence that Altman is preparing to ride off into the sunset. (Trade reports have him starting preparation on his next movie this fall.) Subject matter aside, A Prairie Home Companion doesn't have the feel of a final statement; it's more like the latest chapter in the "one long movie" Altman says he's always been making. It's true that Altman's recent films suffer from a certain uniformity, but if they're much like each other, they're still unlike anything else. Long may he scribble.

A Prairie Home Companion

Directed by Robert Altman A ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Bourse